151 JS Lee
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Full shownotes: https://www.adopteeson.com/listen/151
Haley Radke: [00:00:00] This show is listener supported. You can join us and help our show grow to support more adoptees by going to adopteeson.com/partner.
You are listening to Adoptees On, the podcast where adoptees discuss the adoption experience. This is Episode 151, Jessica Sun Lee. I'm your host, Haley Radke. It's a great honor to bring to you the creative powerhouse, Jessica Sun Lee. We talk about racism, dealing with multiple complex traumas, and the challenge of how we attribute our resilience as adopted people.
I wanna give you a content warning for this episode. We briefly mention childhood sexual abuse, gun violence, sexual assault, and domestic violence.
Jessica has a brand-new book out that we talk about today, so make sure you listen to the end of the show to find out how you can win a signed copy. We wrap up with [00:01:00] some recommended resources and, as always, links to everything we'll be talking about today are on the website, adopteeson.com. Let's listen in.
I'm so pleased to welcome to Adoptees On, Jessica Sun Lee. Welcome, Jessica.
Jessica Sun Lee: Hi Haley. Thanks for having me.
Haley Radke: I can't believe it's taken us this long to get together. I can't wait for a conversation I've been eagerly anticipating for a long time. I'll be candid about that. I would love it if you would start the way we always do. Would you share your story with us?
Jessica Sun Lee: My story has changed over the years, and I'll probably never know the truth. There was so much corruption in Korean adoptions, but it went from being delivered to a police station in Seoul at a day old to being found outside the hospital grounds in Daegu. When I was visiting in Korea in 2006 was when I learned this. I found paperwork [00:02:00] that suggested I was around two weeks old.
From there, I ended up at the White Lily Orphanage in Daegu. I may have lived with a foster mother for up to four months before being adopted at six months old. Then I was adopted to a white family in the Boston suburbs with two older girls, biological to my adopters. And after that my adoptive parents had four more biological kids after my adoption.
So I was the only Asian and right in the middle. We lived in a town that was over 95% white, with summers and weekends in Maine at a house where in that town I was in most cases the first Asian or even person of color people to encounter. So that was interesting.
And we thankfully always had a lot of animals. So I bonded with them more even than my adoptive siblings. I always saw us as more the same, and I know that's really offensive for some adoptees, but for [00:03:00] me that was my experience, just being the soul of my kind. In such a large white family.
Haley Radke: What kind of animals did you have? Do you have a special pet that you remember?
Jessica Sun Lee: Oh, I remember and loved them all. We had two dogs, four cats. There was a hamster, a lizard but really it was the cats and the dogs I really bonded with the most. They brought me a lot of comfort.
Haley Radke: Do you still have pets in your life?
Jessica Sun Lee: Yeah, I have two cats right now. They're siblings; I wasn't about to separate them, adoptee issues. They really come out all the time and yeah, they're wonderful. They're gonna be turning 12 in two weeks.
Haley Radke: I love that. I haven't heard someone mention that to me before, about how important animals were to them as they were growing up. So thank you for saying that. I'm sure some people using the same language of adoption with kids and animals, like [00:04:00] that is super problematic, but I'm sure there's others that will relate to that, just that feeling of, oh, these are my people.
Jessica Sun Lee: No, they were my people.
Haley Radke: They were your people. Wow. Okay. Sorry. Please continue. I'm so curious about what happened for you after that.
Jessica Sun Lee: Oh a lot. Yeah. That's really so much that I'm not sure exactly where to go first, but that was my childhood. That experience of two houses, two very white towns where I was really very much visibly an outsider.
Haley Radke: Okay. So I'm curious because now I know that you are an artist in a variety of capacities. So you're an author of adult fiction, children's books as well. You are an essayist. You [00:05:00] blog regularly.
And you are an artist in various mediums as well. And musical, a singer. I don't know if you play instruments. I don't know. My jaw just kept getting wider and wider open as I saw all the things that you do. So did you feel creative when you were younger? What kind of led you to dabbling in all these sorts of things?
Jessica Sun Lee: Yeah, the way I use my creative outlets varies by medium and has varied throughout my life. At first it was so therapeutic as a child. There were so many inarticulable emotions and experiences that more visual or musical art allowed me to work through. And I was always writing stories and all of those things, just painting, music, writing.
They were like my best friends. The people I could trust, here we go with people again. But yeah, [00:06:00] it's what I had, so I would just spend hours working on things, making things. And I mentioned I had a really large adoptive family, so if you can imagine the noise that was going on in that house.
I had to escape, and escaping into these arts I would always find a closet, whichever room was my bedroom. It moved around. But the running joke in my household was that I was in the closet, which they didn't even know that I was a queer child then, and neither did I really fully understand.
But that was the joke, was that I was in the closet and I was always working on something. To carve out a little bit of peace for myself, but yeah, so we didn't have privacy. Not only were there a lot of people, but it was a big house and we had surveillance cameras and intercom systems in our bedrooms that all fed into little TVs [00:07:00] in the kitchen. Which, yes, I see your face.
It's so nice to get that validation now and how wrong and how strange that is. Because it was my normal, it was my normal growing up. So anyways, my art and music and writing, they were fine. My adopters really loved when it made them proud. Say, I wrote something that furthered their narrative and it maybe won an award at school.
So for a while there was a transition from these things being therapeutic and for me into parental approval. So that's so addictive as a sole adoptee of color in this family, but it was also a betrayal of self. So it took a really long time then after that to reclaim my voice and my creativity for me. And because I was always spied on, my notebooks, diaries, etc., were read out loud and [00:08:00] for things that they didn't approve of, I started to use fiction as a way to tell the truth without getting in trouble.
And I think that's where my love for fiction began, just needing for me to find a way to own my feelings. Where it wasn't going to get me punished. Yeah. That was the kind of household I grew up in.
Haley Radke: I'm so sorry. I got really emotional. Just you sharing relying on fiction as a way to tell the truth without getting in trouble and the lack of privacy and having your journals read out loud and shamed. I am just like, that just makes me feel sick to my stomach.
Jessica Sun Lee: Yeah.
Haley Radke: There's so many things that little people were trying to work through, like our identity especially as adoptees, and I'm just thinking of you as a younger person and how that [00:09:00] would've impacted you.
I love how you said you worked to reclaim it for yourself. Now, can you talk about that? What did that look like and when were you able to take that back?
Jessica Sun Lee: I'd love to say that it started in my teens and that was wonderfully empowering, but it took a lot longer than that for the fiction. Yeah, that was a way to work through therapy. It was my therapy. But I didn't really fully reclaim my voice for decades. It took a long time.
I think probably when I wrote my only memoir, my first book. That was when I really was able because that was nonfiction, first off. But it was a way for me to say I'm not going to be afraid. I'm going to speak my truth here. And whatever happens, happens. And it did. It did end up ultimately separating me from my adopters, and [00:10:00] it's what had to happen. It was a way for me to find freedom.
Haley Radke: I'm not sure if you're familiar with this, but a couple years ago I did a whole series on healing through creativity. And do you resonate with that at all?
Jessica Sun Lee: Yes. Yeah. I feel like that why I've gravitated to all of these different art forms is really for healing purposes. It's allowed me to have a voice when the alternative was to have none, was to be silenced. It allowed me to try to shape things, try to make sense of things, because I wasn't able to speak clearly. I wasn't able to say what I was really feeling inside. And I do think it is such an empowering thing to allow yourself to explore, to explore whatever's going on in there. And that was my way. [00:11:00] It's still my way.
Haley Radke: Thank you. I appreciate that. What I really have appreciated is all of your posts and writing lately, especially on criticizing in various ways all these issues, adoption, racism, classism, and I know you've seen the absurdest comparison of adoption as slavery because you wrote a blog post about that on your website. And I'll make sure to link to that in the show notes.
And the one really problematic comment I hear very frequently from fellow adoptees, and this is in regards to receiving original birth certificates and you've probably heard this too, that (I'm putting this in my air quotes) adoptees are the last group denied their civil rights. Now over the last few months, we're recording this during pandemic times and, here's the buzzword, the unprecedented civil unrest in the United States, but do you see any movement in this [00:12:00] area?
In particular with adoptees over the last few months? What I think I've seen is I've seen a few adoptees get schooled over this.
Jessica Sun Lee: Yeah. This is a really hard area because honestly I haven't seen as much movement as I would like. There are still so many who look at trauma and oppression competitively, and it's not just white adoptees either.
And when I try to make sense of it. I think it's invalidation, right? I think invalidation is just so painful and adoptees in general are so used to not being able to have our trauma witnessed, our pain accepted. So we might tend to make these overblown statements in comparisons hoping that it's going to be recognized that way, and unfortunately, it's very offensive.
There's no excuse for it, but I think that might be where it's coming from, but there are some who truly get it [00:13:00] though. And it really means a lot to me to see that, for me to see certain white and domestic adoptees, for instance, using their platform to talk to other white people and say, listen, this is what's going on.
Because the sad truth is for a lot of white people, they need to hear it from white people. They won't listen to me. So that is, I think, being a true accomplice.
Haley Radke: Thank you for that challenge. I have been learning a lot myself over the last number of months and what it means to be an ally and anti-racist and those things, and I'm certainly cringing at myself at many times where I've had transracial adoptees and asked them to explain microaggressions to me and all kinds of those things. So I'm for sure learning myself.
Now talking about the times we're in, your brand-new book, Everyone Was Falling, tackles so many of the very important issues that society is grappling with right now. [00:14:00] So all kinds of themes: homophobia, racism, gun control, mental health issues. And, this is awkward, but all I could think of was that line from Hamilton, which I know also can be problematic, why do you write like you're running out of time? And so that's what I was thinking when I was reading your book.
And do you have a sense that there's something in you, that you need to get these things out and just these are the issues right now and this is the message I wanna get out in my book.
Jessica Sun Lee: Yeah. There's definitely a sense of urgency and I started writing this book in December of 2016, just after Trump's election.
So for several months I'd been witnessing the varied views of my network, and I sensed Trump's win coming. Several people I'd [00:15:00] known from my hometown and beyond, which is a blue state, were finally sharing some horrifying views. So when he was elected, I, like many, was deeply depressed, not only for what I saw coming in terms of immigrants and people of color, but for us.
But he's clearly a narcissist, and I had just cut ties with the narcissist in my life. So it was infuriating and to see how many people were willing to sell out the marginalized people that they supposedly loved in our families. People in our families, because we weren't considered, we were the exceptions, right?
So I wrote this book as a form of therapy, as they all are for me, and all of these themes in the book crash into one another because all of my vulnerable identities and pressure points were colliding at once. So I also really wanted to convey how we all handle traumas differently, right? And how we [00:16:00] handle them is gonna vary by our identities and life experiences and how society views or treats us.
For instance, in the book, the three main characters: Christie is the white woman and this trauma is her only trauma. So she is able to work through it in a much more free way. Where Lucy, the Asian queer adoptee, is dealing with a lot of homophobia and a lot of racism in her family. And Donna, the black character, she is viewed as a suspect. So she can't even begin to process the trauma of the gun violence because she's under attack.
So I just really wanted to explore that. And since you follow me on social media, you know that I struggle with a message from white folks that change happens slowly and you've gotta be patient. Because not everyone has time, right? So there's that sense of urgency again. There are black folks getting murdered in the streets by [00:17:00] people that are supposed to protect them. And when they're not killed, black and brown people are jailed for petty crimes, their families disrupted with ripples and ripples of repercussions.
We all know about the children in cages at the border, separated from their parents who have no means of tracking them, and there's been the heightened anti-Asian violence still ongoing through this pandemic. Which is always under-reported. So when white folks talk about the time it's gonna take, it's hard not to get riled by that because, yeah, we're running out of time.
Too many have already run out of time. And so while we're witnessing people who are really well intentioned, just starting their education, starting to read books and to try to understand things people are dying and there's irreparable harm being done. So with all of that pressure that I've been feeling I also wanted to empower people, namely people of color and women.
Because I don't [00:18:00] know if or how we're gonna get out of this tangled mess of capitalism, racism, and all these other terrible -isms. But if we do, it's not gonna be by playing by the rules, right? So that’s, without giving any spoilers, part of what's in the book.
I love that Audrey Lorde quote that a master's tools will never dismantle the master's house. That is so poignant. We're going to have to find ways around the system. Because we can't work within it. It wasn't built for us. The way it functions is by design. So all of this stuff is why I felt so compelled to write Everyone Was Falling.
Haley Radke: Goodness, 2016 you started. That's really amazing. So you've tackled, as I mentioned, some really intense subjects in Everyone Was Falling and also in Keurium. Am I saying that right? Curium?
Jessica Sun Lee: That's okay. Close enough. [00:19:00]
Haley Radke: Close enough is not good. She's so polite. And the grimace.
Jessica Sun Lee: Well, I'll tell you, I had to learn the word too. As a transracial adoptee, I didn't have my language and it's hard for me to say as well, but I asked for some help to learn how to say it correctly. It's like a D for the R,
Haley Radke: I'm almost there. I always wanna get people's names right. It's very important to me and so it's important to me to get your book title right, too.
Back to my question, the topics you cover are so intense and you mentioned before fiction is a way to tell the truth without getting in trouble. So I'm wondering if you're comfortable sharing any parts of your story that you bring through into your books and your personal understanding of PTSD. [00:20:00]
Jessica Sun Lee: Yeah, this is when we get real here, right? Not that, we haven't been already. I'm obviously a transracial adoptee. I'm a survivor of childhood sexual abuse, narcissistic abuse, racial trauma. I was raped at gunpoint by multiple offenders a month after I turned 16, so I'm familiar with that type of gun violence and sexual violence.
And that's a lot, right? Despite that, while all of these things were so awful, it took decades to fully understand them and how they impacted my life. You’re just trying to survive; you’re just trying to keep putting another step forward. So it took me a really long time. I repeated the unhealthy dynamics of my childhood in adult relationships, both friendships and romantic, because I didn't have the chance to process them when they were happening.
I also experienced domestic violence. I left my abusive first husband, who was also an adoptee, at age 24. So while I was waking up to my adoptee trauma in my late twenties and how the [00:21:00] rape affected me in my thirties, it was only about five years ago that I realized the rest. I had written my adoptive mother to tell her I was finally starting to heal from the rape at 16, and her response floored me.
Instead of being happy that her daughter was finally finding peace around such a life changing trauma, she chose that opportunity to blame me for putting her through so much stress the night that it happened when she didn't know where I was. So it was just incomprehensible but it was actually bad enough for me to finally see that there was something deeply wrong.
I think it's what I really needed and I'm not glad for any of this, but it helped me see the truth. A prior therapist had once suggested that she was a narcissist, but I didn't fully understand what that meant. And I'd been blaming myself for so long for not being able [00:22:00] to get our relationship right.
So when I was finally able to see that it opened more doors to the many things that went wrong in that house. I'm not gonna lie, it was a grueling few years of processing and just coping and trying to write and get my head around things and to feel like I could move on from it all. But I had a lot of help from some key friends, online support groups.
I had a therapist, which not everybody can have, and I had my own inner will to get through it. So I have this joke that I'm alive because I'm stubborn. I wanted to live to tell my stories, and I've got plenty to keep me going. So yeah.
Haley Radke: Thank you for sharing that. One of the Twitter threads you wrote talks about resilience, and I think this is a good time to mention it because we see a lot of [00:23:00] adoptees taking some kind of pride in their resilience because they've been adopted. And you have a little bit of a different take on that. So I just wanna give you the space to talk through some of those things, if you wouldn't mind. And you have a very sobering reason for it, I think.
Jessica Sun Lee: Yeah. I have a lot of feelings around that, I think, as you can imagine. I do think it's great to look at what we've made of our lives in spite of the traumas we've been through and feel proud of who we've become. I think that's so important, but I absolutely reject the idea that we owe thanks to our traumas.
I am the one who made me who I am today through a lot of hard work. And honestly, there are many times when I didn't make it. We owe ourselves that gratitude and not the things that nearly killed us, not the things that tried to kill us. We are the ones who do all the work and continue to do the work every [00:24:00] day.
A big step in my personal healing journey, which is going to be a lifelong event, has been giving myself a chance to wonder what could I have become if not for my traumas? What if I hadn't been taken from my country, culture, family language? What if I didn't have to spend so much time coping with the aftermath of my other traumas?
How might I have thrived? What might I have created? What might I have done? And I know all of that's so taboo. When I was younger it was, and some people still think it is now. They get upset, maybe because they don't wanna go there themselves? So we're not allowed; society tells us we're not allowed.
But honestly, going through those questions and that process just gave me a chance to have self-compassion for myself. Something that was so hard for me, that I really struggled with and I still do struggle with today, but it helps me move on. [00:25:00]
Haley Radke: I really appreciate that reframing and I think it's very powerful. So I think you've given us a lot to think about just with that.
Going back to Everyone Was Falling, you've got a character with multiple layers of trauma, as is your personal experience. And I've talked with other therapists about complex trauma and for adoptees, there's all of these compounding layers and we all have different stories and different experiences, but I'm curious how you wrote Everyone Was Falling with this character that has these multiple layers and picturing someone who's not adopted or doesn't have an understanding of PTSD or just being adopted in particular. What would you hope that someone like that would read and learn through your book, through your words? [00:26:00]
Is that something you think about when you write that someone outside of adoptee land might really have a deeper understanding of an adoptee?
Jessica Sun Lee: I should say it's good for a writer to be mindful of their desired leadership, and for me, it's not outsiders. I write for myself and my people. I want us to feel seen. Anyone else who reads it and gains value from it is a bonus. So they're like the cherry on top. I think a lot of folks like myself with multiple marginalizations and multiple traumas can be really frustrated by the way, society only seems to focus on one thing at a time.
A singular marginalized identity, one major trauma, but life's kind of messy, at least mine has been. We don't get to choose. We don't always get to choose just one focus. And the complexities of managing multiple stressors is a reality for a lot of us, especially people of color. And I'm always thinking of the younger [00:27:00] generation and trying to give them what I might have wanted or think about what I might have needed.
If you're one of the demographics that industry caters towards, you might take for granted how valuable it is to see yourself accurately represented in a variety of ways. I'm probably going to pronounce her name incorrectly, but I just love a writer named Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie. She did this talk called “The Danger of a Single Story.” You can Google it. It's a great short piece where she talks about how, because as marginalized people, our stories aren't told in platitude that there's so much pressure for us to tell everybody's story in one story.
And with that mindset, we're going to fail because no story can do that. We should be able to tell all of the stories we wanna tell without having them have to represent an entire community. And basically the solution to that is [00:28:00] for more marginalized people to be given more opportunities to tell our stories.
And I know for adoptees, we're always trying to fight against the happy-go-lucky, perfect, fairytale adoption story. So that's for adoptees. And then add every other marginalization or different identity on top of that. There's so much pressure to cover everybody and you just can't. We can't do that.
Haley Radke: I'm curious if you have thoughts on non-adopted people writing adoptees as characters.
Jessica Sun Lee: Yeah, I do have thoughts on that. I think it happens too often and I haven't seen it done very well frequently. There might be one that I think had a lot of research behind it, but typically I find it offensive.
The representation tends to fall [00:29:00] into stereotypes that we adoptees fight against. And when it comes to movies, especially, oof, that I find extremely upsetting because that's so accessible to the public. It's what people are going to gravitate towards. There's more investment in getting through a book than maybe an hour-and-a-half, two-hour movie.
And a lot of times it's really frustrating to see the poor representation and to have the things that we're constantly, the adoptee creatives, are fighting against. It's just being piled on top with these dangerous, incorrect narratives.
Haley Radke: What you said earlier about writing for yourself and for your community, something I actually love about both of the fiction books that I've read of yours, I think, the general public would love them as well, and there's this big education piece to me, and I always picture [00:30:00] someone who has no connection to adoption reading, like what an adoptee's experience could really be like.
And it's on the slide, they're learning things about adoptee life without maybe intending to. So yeah, I totally agree about all the tropes that adoptees are put into. More than just adoptees, pick up your book.
Okay. As we're winding down, let's go back to writing a little bit. And you said you, you did write a memoir. I haven't read it. I'll admit. I didn't know you had a memoir. I think a lot of adoptees focus on writing memoir as their first book. And I've heard from a lot of my listeners that they're trying to write down their story and trying to get their truth out there.
Is there something you could give advice in that area? Maybe there's some permission that's given in fiction that could be a little bit more freeing for them. What are your thoughts on that for an adoptee [00:31:00] who feels like they need to get their story out, but it's a little bit scary to do memoir.
Jessica Sun Lee: Yeah. I think that it is a great way to take back some power by owning your story. I highly recommend it. I don't think you have to be a writer to do that. I think you should. It's a very therapeutic process, and I would say write it as if nobody's going to read it. That's how you're gonna get the most truth. especially as adoptees, there's that fear, like you just mentioned.
You need to be as honest as possible not just about the events, but, you know, how you are feeling along the way and how different situations or pieces of awareness just moved through you. I think that's what makes it really all the more therapeutic and real. And just keep writing.
Just keep writing, keep revising and don't expect to ever have money. [00:32:00] I see some people saying, oh, I just need to write a book and all these, and, oh, that's not how it works. You write it because you need to. Because you need to, because the story needs to be heard. You need to tell that story, and if it's important to you, you'll find a way to bring it out.
You know what's funny to me? I follow a lot of writers on Twitter and I see a lot of them talking about how miserable the process is. And I don't get that. I wonder if maybe they're just not writing what they really want to write, because for me, nothing else I do makes me feel more whole, more like myself, than when I'm writing, out of all the things that I do.
And maybe I feel that way because for so long I wasn't free to speak my truth. But it is just, I think, such a wonderful gift to give yourself is to be able to write your story. I do think, personally, I do prefer fiction. Not because of fear of getting in [00:33:00] trouble anymore, but I just think it is a way for me to be more honest and reveal even more because I have to look at things from a slightly different angle. And, creating characters that you get to know on the most intimate level is so satisfying for me.
But then of course, bringing my adoption back into this, it's sad to move on once you get to know these characters that you've created so well. It's abandonment perhaps rising because even when I am starting a new novel that I'm so excited about, there's a longing, a sadness, not a betrayal, but like a feeling of loss. So that's how close I think a lot of writers get to their characters. It's very rewarding.
Haley Radke: That is so special insider info to know. I haven't heard anyone talk about that before and I think it's because I probably have conversations a [00:34:00] lot with more memoir authors or in the self-help genre. So that is really special, like they’re your people again.
Jessica Sun Lee: Yeah. I had to create my own people. I do have my people now too that live outside, real breathing people.
Haley Radke: I'm so glad you mentioned that. Everyone can know that Jessica's is okay, She’s got all her friends and her chosen people.
Oh my goodness, I've learned so much from you. And right at the beginning you shared that your story has changed over the years based on information that people were giving you. And so you don't necessarily know your true beginnings, and coming to writing your story changes over the years as well, likely. Thank you for that wisdom. I really find that valuable.
Okay. So let's move to recommended resources. [00:35:00] And I'm so excited to have you on to share about your books. So your brand-new book, it's gonna be released in just a couple of days, which is so exciting. Are you excited or do you get nervous for release?
Jessica Sun Lee: Yeah, it's a mixture of both. I am excited for people to read it. I do think it's unintentionally very timely. I didn't expect for the past six months to have been what they have been, but yeah, we'll see what people think. I do think it's gonna have a lot of mixed results. It's gonna be challenging for some people.
I'd love to know how it was for you to read?
Haley Radke: So it's called Everyone Was Falling and I read it. I probably would've read it in one sitting had I not had my little people around bothering me. But I loved it and I loved all the nuances of the various characters. And I find it hard to do a [00:36:00] review when I don't wanna give any spoilers whatsoever.
I wouldn't even read the back cover. I would just go in and just enjoy the experience. You'll learn a lot from reading it, and I found it really powerful and insightful. There are so many little nuggets that I highlighted through the whole book and I don't wanna spoil anything. What can I read to you that would be not spoilery?
Jessica, while I was reading it, I thought, am I really learning a lot about Jessica through reading this? Because there's these little vignettes and moments where you share an experience about connecting with other adoptees and connecting with something with Korean culture and all of those little pieces.
I felt that was a really powerful way to get to know an author through reading fiction. So I might have made some assumptions during that time as well. So I'm really glad I got the opportunity to interview you, [00:37:00] to hear a little bit more about that. And your other book was so good, too. And the cover! Now tell me something. Did you design this?
Jessica Sun Lee: I did, yeah.
Haley Radke: Okay. Can you describe the cover for us?
Jessica Sun Lee: It's an Asian woman's profile. So she's sort of part of her, half of her face is above water, so you can see her forehead, eyes, nose, mouth, and chin. But the water is rising. And there's a reflection of her in the water. It's a bit fragmented, so it really ties into the story of Keurium, where she is without power. She's catatonic in the hospital for half the book. And she's reflecting on her past, on pieces of her past, and trying to make sense of them because she didn't have the opportunity to do so along the way.
So now that she's stuck in this state and has [00:38:00] nothing, no excuses, no distractions but her own mind, she's able to find her truth and understand her past and how it led to where she ends up.
Haley Radke: And so when I look at the covers together and I also see fragmentation that maybe I'm reading into that, but on the cover of Everyone was Falling.
Jessica Sun Lee: Oh yeah, so Everyone was Falling. The sensitivity reader, Emmy, who I worked with was fantastic. She and I were chatting and I was really having a struggle with the design of this cover, and she suggested what about having the fireworks somehow overlaying her face? The character’s face. And I said, oh, I never actually thought of that.
And I started playing with it and I loved it because so much of her story just came to [00:39:00] life. And of course the story began the weekend of 4th of July. And the PTSD of fireworks and everything just fit. I didn't intend for it to be a collaboration, but it ended up being really cool.
Haley Radke: If there was ever any doubt, Jessica is a true artist. She's got a beautiful eye for that. And so creative. I love them both. I'll admit, I have stared at the cover of Keurium for a long time just because I do find it very powerful. So to hear you explain it is wonderful.
Jessica Sun Lee: Thank you.
Haley Radke: Please go check out Jessica's books. I'm curious what you brought for us today as your recommended resource.
Jessica Sun Lee: So this is very unorthodox because I know I've listened to your show and it's usually adoptee-centric resources, but I really felt it might be important to recommend something that's Asian American history because we aren't [00:40:00] really taught Asian American history in the United States, especially not accurate history.
So I read this wonderful book by a woman named Helen Zia and she reads her own story. So let me just back up a little. The title of the book is called Asian American Dreams: The Emergence of an American People, and it was written in 2001. I believe she might be working on re-releasing it because it is so timely right now.
She weaves her story in through Asian American history and how her firsthand experiences of living through the lynching of Vincent Chin and, as a journalist, how she became an activist and so much information that I had no idea about. And I know others don't either.
In the United States, the Asian Americans [00:41:00], we have been used as a tool of anti-blackness to prop up this whole bootstraps mentality to keep other people of color, black, Latinx, more brown people down. And the truth is, we are the race that has the greatest wealth gap also. We are not a monolith, the one that they choose to portray us as.
It’s, I just think, a very crucial piece of history, not a piece of history but we're a demographic that's very misunderstood in this country. And I think the more we understand the way different races of people have been used and oppressed, the more we can know what's going on today.
Yeah, that's my long-winded answer.
Haley Radke: I love it. Thanks for challenging us. I think we need to be challenged more often. Thank you so much for sharing your story with us and [00:42:00] for those insights into why you write. I'm really thankful. Where can we connect with you online?
Jessica Sun Lee: I first just wanna say thank you to you. I love what you do. Thanks for giving a voice to a variety of different types of adoptees. It's wonderful and I can be found at jessicasunlee.com. My Twitter handle is also Jessica Sun Lee.
Haley Radke: And where is the best place to pick up Everyone Was Falling?
Jessica Sun Lee: I'm going to say any independent bookstore. Support your independent bookstores. They need it now more than ever. And they care for us. They care for writers; they care for the community. The larger stores don't.
And if you go on to my website or if you just type in everyonewasfalling.com, it will lead to that page and it has links to bookshop.org, indiebound.org and then there's also an Amazon link if you feel that's the way you'd like to buy them. [00:43:00]
Those, I think, are the best alternatives to just calling up your local bookstore and asking for it, and they'll get it for you.
Haley Radke: Perfect. Love it. And just so you guys know, when an author is releasing a brand-new book, this is the best time to pre-order if you can. If you're listening to this after it's released, no problem. Grab it anyway and make sure you go and rate and review it wherever you like to collect those things.
So you can give five stars on Amazon. You can go to Goodreads, anywhere that you like to look for books. It's really helpful to authors if you give it five stars and write, even if it's just a couple sentences. It's super, super duper helpful. Thanks so much for chatting with me today, Jessica.
As we mentioned at the beginning of the [00:44:00] show, Adoptees On and Jessica Sun Lee are doing a signed-book giveaway. So to find out how to enter, go over to Instagram and the Adoptees On Instagram account. The handle is @adopteeson, and we will have a post with the two books that Jessica is giving away, signed copies, to one listener.
And we will have the instructions on that giveaway post. So go to Instagram @adopteeson is the handle, and you can easily find that post. You'll have about a week to enter from when this episode airs, and Jessica will be sending those books out. So excited. We haven't done a giveaway for a while, so that's really fun.
I am really thankful for people like Jessica who are willing to share some of the really hard things with us and I know there's a lot of you that are going through it right now, especially during the [00:45:00] pandemic times, and I know in the US there's elections and all kinds of things happening. Thinking of you, it's rough out there.
So I'm really grateful for those of you that keep speaking up, keep sharing your story and keep talking about the difficult things and not pretending like they're not happening. The other thanks I wanna give is to my monthly Patreon supporters.
So thankful for your support. I wouldn't be able to do the show without you. And like I said, a few weeks ago, we're going back to our weekly schedule with new episodes. And so you are helping to cover the production costs of the show, which is just a great help to me. So if you wanna join the other people that think Adoptees On is so valuable, they're willing to even share the cost of producing the show. Go to adopt design.com/partner and there's more details there.
And also details of all the fun benefits [00:46:00] you get by supporting the show monthly, including another weekly podcast. So I know we're on show #152 here. On Off Script. I think we're up to Episode 77, so I am well into the two hundreds of podcast making, which is wild.
Anyway, thanks so much for being here. Thanks for listening, and let's talk again next Friday.
